


Drift Compatible

by professortennant



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: AU, Drift Compatibility, F/M, Happy Ending, Kinda, Pacific Rim AU, Soulmate AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-07-01
Packaged: 2020-05-31 14:27:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19427839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/professortennant/pseuds/professortennant
Summary: Jack O'Neill lost his son the last time he got into one of those damn Jaegers and he didn't think he could ever recover from the loss. But the world is at war and an old friend has come calling, begging for his return. In a bunker a few miles beneath a burning world, Jack O'Neill meets Samantha Carter and their lives change.





	Drift Compatible

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. i forgot what actually happens in pacific rim about 1K words in  
> 2\. i wanted them to kiss about 3K in and got bored so hurried the story up  
> 3\. this is, as usual, unbeta'd and all mistakes are my own (i'm sure there are typos, my bastard of a laptop keyboard is dying)

Jack O’Neill fits into this brave new world of theirs as effortlessly as breathing. War was war, after all, even for a washed up soldier like himself. Instead of sand and insurgents and automatic weapons, though, they now had tidal waves and goddamn fighting robots and deep-sea, otherworldly creatures. 

Hammond had found him in one of the city’s last true dive bars, looking to bury himself at the bottom of his whiskey glass. His voice had been gentle, but stern: “Son, we need you back. We have a Jaeger for you. We need _you_.”

Jack thinks about the last time he was in the Jaeger with Charlie, nineteen and so damn eager to fight alongside his father. The searing pain of losing his son while their neural bridge was engaged flares up and he takes a more than healthy swig of amber liquid from his glass. 

“I won’t be compatible with anyone, George. Damn near broke me last time.”

His old friend takes the seat beside him and steals the rest of his drink, downing it in one go before putting the empty glass between them on the bar. “It’s die in this bar, alone and hurting, at the bottom of a bottle or give it a fighting chance up in the Jaeger, taking one of them Kaiju son-of-a-bitches down. It’s up to you.”

In the end, there is no choice. Jack O’Neill is a fighter and he will go down swinging. In fact, he’s hoping for it. It would be an end to the pain he’s been living with, an end to the emptiness in his brain where his son’s neural link used to be. 

When he arrives at the command center, an abandoned military outpost now used for Jaeger building and training, he is greeted by Hammond and a young blonde woman with thick-rimmed glasses and a clipboard in hand. 

Jack shakes hands with Hammond first and then turns his attention to the woman who meets his eyes with a steady, penetrating gaze. He reaches for her hand and she takes it, eyes never leaving his. 

“Jack, this is Dr. Samantha Carter. She’s one of our top scientists on the Stargate program and one of our most valuable assets.”

“Stargate?” Jack questions, looking at the scientist. Funny, she looks like a scientist--glasses and stacks of papers and the kind of careful thought before each word that he’d grown accustomed to around Daniel--but she moves like a fighter, shakes his hand like a soldier. 

She flushes under his gaze and avoids Hammond’s disapproving head shake and explains as they walk deep through the halls of the command center. “It’s my name for the Jaeger we built, sir. It’s outfitted with enough fuel, weapons, and boosters that you could travel to the next galaxy if you wanted to.”

Her words stir something in the back of his mind and he grins at her, cocking his head. “You named it after the Stargate books? The kid’s book series?”

She lifts her head defiantly. “Rules of the base, sir. You build it, you name it.”

Jack decides then and there he likes this woman. He had read Charlie the Stargate series growing up and it felt right somehow, made him feel connected to his son, to know that he shared a memory with his Jaeger’s namesake. 

Hammond excuses himself from the mini tour of the base, assuring Jack that Carter would take care of him from here on out. Jack tries not to look _too_ eager at the prospect of spending the rest of the day one-on-one with her. 

They wander the base together and he listens intently, enjoying the sound of wonder and excitement in her voice, as she shows him the science and engineering labs and the main control rooms where Jaegers all around them were being tuned up and inspected, tweaked and improved. 

“And _this_ is yours,” she said, a hint of pride sneaking onto her face. The robotic machine was easily the size of a building, gleaming and shining under the fluorescent lights of the base. Around him, the sounds of the personnel bustling between control panels and rooms and Jaegers faded away. He allowed his fingers to graze over the cool metal reverently and looked up, taking in a deep breath. 

He could still hear Charlie’s laughter, still feel the weight of his son’s arm slinging over his shoulder’s as he ribbed Jack: “ _C’mon old man, we can take ‘em.”_

The place in his brain where he and Charlie once shared a neural link flared brightly with pain—whether it was real or imagined, he didn’t know.

“Sir?” 

Soft fingers brushed over his elbow, bringing him back to the present and out of the pain of memories. His eyes met the concerned blue eyes of Dr. Carter and he smiled reassuringly at her. 

“Just been a while since I’ve seen one of these.” He took a deep breath and drummed his fingers along the sides of the Jaeger before taking a step back and pushing his hands into his pockets and rocking back on his heels. “So, who’s the unlucky son-of-a-bitch who’s riding shotgun with me?”

Carter looked like she wanted to push the issue, push the look in his eyes and ask questions about the incident no doubt in his file that she was clutching to her chest. But she swallowed down her question and turned on her heel, leading him away. 

“Right this way.”

________________

The candidates for the position of Jack’s co-pilot lined themselves up along the far wall, rolling a wooden training staff between their hands. Jack looked at each of the young men’s faces, scrutinizing and evaluating, then turned to face Carter and Hammond at the other end of the room. 

“You sure you’re ready for this, son?” 

Hammond’s booming voice echoed throughout the training room and Jack grinned ruefully, shrugging out of his jacket and toeing off his boots. “Well, General, unless we have time for me to take each of these fine gentlemen out for a beer, get to know their hopes, their dreams, and so on…” 

Hammond frowned at him and Jack shrugged, taking the last training staff on the rack, and facing the candidates. He noticed Carter’s half-formed smile at his words before she had ducked her head and hidden it from him.

“Okay boys,” he addressed the candidates. “One at a time, please.”

The men were fine fighters, Jack decided. But they were just that—fine. The first two were too eager, all bursts of frantic energy and wild hits. He pinned them down easily, looking up to where Hammond and Carter are watching, where Carter is taking down scores and the fight time duration. 

Hammond looks unfazed but Carter has a slight frown, a wrinkle between her eyebrows that seems to indicate annoyance or displeasure—with him or the recruits, he isn’t sure.

The next fight is almost worth the sweat forming along the small of his back and dropping down his brow. The man is big, with an intricate golden tattoo sparkling over his skin, and moves with grace. Jack can appreciate the careful, strategic hits the man puts on him. But he’s _too_ careful and Jack strikes hard and fast and knocks his opponent off of his feet.

He hoists the man—Teal’c, his name tag reads—off of the mat and turns to face Hammond and Carter once more, wondering if they are going to call it for this man. He’s been the best of the bunch and while it wasn’t a perfect fight, it felt good enough, he supposes. 

Hammond looks intrigued, eyebrow raised and head tilted in consideration. But Carter’s frown is more pronounced and she almost looks _angry_ as she writes down the statistics of the fight on her clipboard. 

“Alright,” he pants, leaning against his staff. “What is _with you_?”

Carter looks startled, clutching her clipboard to her chest and shooting a look to Hammond before returning her gaze to Jack’s. “Excuse me?” She sounds dangerous and he likes the thrill it sends tingling down his spine.

This is a fight he really, _really_ wants to pick.

“Every damn time I look up at you after a fight, you look pissed off. You make this little—“ He scrunches up his face in an approximation of Carter’s expression, all frown lines and narrowed eyes. “I can’t tell if you’re pissed off at me or them.” He jerks a thumb over his shoulder at the winded and beaten candidates. “So what’s your problem, Carter?”

The direct question seems to jar her and she narrows her eyes at him again. 

“Gah! There it is! That’s the face! So it _is_ me.”

“You’re pulling your punches, sir. You could’ve knocked almost all of them out about two moves before you actually did.”

He snorts. “You think so?”

“I _know_ so.”

Jack tilts his head, appraising her. In truth, he’s impressed. He _had_ been pulling punches. The last thing he wanted to do was tip his hand, show everyone what he could actually do—even after all these years out of service. But Carter had seen right through him.

“Then why don’t you come down here and make me stop pulling punches, Carter?”

She looked at Hammond who shook his head. “Sam,” the General started. “Your father—“

“Isn’t here,” she finished for him. Carter handed the General her clipboard and murmured something low that Jack couldn’t hear, but Hammond looked resigned and simply nodded, gesturing for her to join Jack on the training mats.

She slipped out of her shoes and shrugged out of her jacket, then pulled her hair back into a ponytail and faced him with determination.

He tossed her a training staff. “I assume staffs are acceptable?”

“What? You preferred we arm wrestled?”

Oh yeah, he liked her. 

“Let’s go, Carter.”

When they clashed in the middle of the mat, their training staffs whacking hard in alternating parries and attacks, Jack found himself actually thinking and strategizing. She changed the pace during the fight, changed the strength and force of each hit. It kept him on his toes. 

Until it didn’t.

He found himself hitting the mats hard, the air knocking from his lungs, as she pinned him to the floor and disarmed him. His staff went flying out of his hands as she finished him off, straddling his waist and pressing her staff against his throat. 

He should be pissed at being bested. He should be embarrassed at being laid out so effectively in front of an audience.

But he couldn’t help the bright grin on his face. She was magnificent. 

Panting, he turned his head from his pinned position on the floor, to meet Hammond’s eyes. 

“Her,” he said. “I want her.”

When he turned his gaze back to Carter’s, he was finally met with what he had wanted to see all along: a full blown, ear-to-ear smile. 

________________

Later, when he knows he’s supposed to be listening to Hammond spell out all the reasons that he and Carter _can’t_ be co-pilots, he thinks about that smile, the light in her eyes, and the heavy, warm weight of her body pressed against his. 

Carter is in the chair next to him, the side of her foot pressed against his, as she argues with the General. Jack is content to let her do the fighting. 

There’s a dopey smile on his face because he knows co-pilots for Jaegers are more than just fighting skill. You need a _connection_. And he and Carter have one. 

And Hammond knows it, too.

In the end, there’s nothing the General can do about it. There’s only one thing left to test: drift compatibility.

________________

“Nervous?” he asks her, fingers brushing over her elbow. Her face is pale and he can see the pulse throbbing in her neck. It had been a breeze linking with Charlie. His son was so much like himself that sharing his memories, his thoughts, his instincts was as easy as breathing.

But for all of his gut instincts about the woman standing to his left, Carter was still a stranger. Even if she had read about the things he’d done, she hadn’t experienced them via neural link.

And he had no idea what shadows lay in the recesses of her own mind. 

Carter swallowed and looked over at him. “A bit. I’ve never—I mean, I know the science behind it of course. But, I’ve got my own ghosts, sir.”

He nudged her shoulder with his own. “There’s nothing in there that’s gonna scare me off, Carter. We can do this.”

When he links his fingers with hers and squeezes, pressing their palms together, and strolling into the compatibility room, he tells himself it’s what he would do for any co-pilot and absolutely has nothing to do with the growing warmth in his chest at the sight of her or the eagerness to share every meal, every moment with her. 

They keep their hands linked as Fraiser and Jackson work to hook them up to beeping machines and monitors. Doc Fraiser is the one who injects them with a wince and an apology. 

“Just something to loosen you up, open the neural pathways in your brains to prepare you both for the link. It can ease the bonding between non-familial pilots.”

Carter’s eyes are blown wide, pupils dilated, and looks at him with such open trust and affection that for a moment, he can’t even rustle up the pain that she _isn’t_ Charlie. 

He manages to squeeze her hand one more time, hoping to convey everything that needed to be said in that one movement, before the docs and scientists are firing up the neural links and for the first time in almost five years, his brain—his _soul—_ connects with another person. 

It’s all flashes and blurs of memories and experiences—his and Carter’s—blending and mashing together. He sees Charlie in the front yard of their house, maybe eight years old, giggling and running away from Jack’s outstretched, wiggling fingers. Then it’s a teenage Carter, crying into her bedroom pillow, the overwhelming pressing weight of grief pushing them down. There’s the smell of chocolate chip cookies in the air and it makes him inexplicably sad. 

There’s the memory of their first meeting floating to the surface, the curiosity, the intrigue, the respect, and to his surprise, the mutual white-hot flash of attraction. The memory fades away and they’re thrown back into each other’s pasts. Sara and a wedding dress, Carter contemplating a sparkling engagement ring in a velvet box, applications to NASA, the death of her father, and then, painfully, excruciatingly, Charlie’s death. 

It goes like that for what feels like hours but in reality is seconds. Every emotion, every memory, every thought, is neither his nor hers, but _theirs._ In one single neural link, she has become his confidante, his partner, his—well, _his._

When the link finally breaks, when they come down from their shared experiences, their hands are still intertwined. He has just enough time to meet her red-rimmed, watery eyes before she disentangles herself from him and rushes out the door. 

“I won’t take that personally,” he manages out to Fraiser before turning his head and vomiting into the nearby trash bin and collapsing on the floor. He really, _really_ hates first time linking. 

But he was right. 

He and Samantha Carter are drift compatible. 

________________

The knock on his bunk door doesn’t surprise him. He’s been expecting this, expecting her. But he is still left breathless at the sight of her in his doorway, holding a couple of bottles of bootleg beer and dressed in soft, thin clothing.

“Figured we could both do with these, sir.”

He waves her in and takes the beer from her. The bunk quarters are fairly limited: a twin-sized bed in the corner, a table that doubles as a desk, and a single two-seater couch pressed against the far wall with a tall reading lamp at its side. Personnel were expected to take all meals in the commissary and communal bathrooms were, unfortunately, the norm these days.

Jack knocks the caps off the beer and hands one back to Carter who has situated herself on one side of the small couch, knees drawn up to her chest and chin resting on her knees. She looks small and fragile and feminine, unlike the woman he had known over the last few days who laid him out on the training mats and rambled about Jaeger and compatibility science.

“Was that your first time linking?”

She took a healthy drag of the beer in her hand before nodding. Jack stared at the spot next to her on the couch before taking a gulp of his own beer and taking the seat. It meant they were pressed together hip to thigh to knee. She was warm everywhere they touched and the place in his brain where they linked earlier in the day tingled in recognition and awareness. 

“We’ve known each other all of four days, but after today…” She trailed off, searching for the words. But Jack knew what she was trying to say. 

“It’s like we’ve known each other our whole lives.”

“But it isn’t real!” she exclaimed. “This _feeling_ isn’t real. I don’t know you. Not really. And yet, I know so much about you. And you…you know everything about me, too.”

“Not everything,” he reassures her. “You have no idea if I’m a boxers or briefs kinda guy. And if you _did_ manage to catch that during the link, well, I can only say that those Simpsons boxers were a joke.”

She blinks at him, once, twice, and then bursts into laughter. The sight and sound of her laughing makes him grin and he likes the way she presses herself against him as she doubles over, trying to contain her laughter. 

When she sobers, she leans back against the arm of his couch and takes another drag of her beer. He wishes she’d push and ask to see if he’s a boxers or briefs kind of guy right now. He’s more than willing to demonstrate for her first hand, if she’d ask. 

“Should we talk about anything we saw today?” she asks tentatively. “I mean, I know about your son, but if there’s something you wanted to ask me or…”

He considers her a moment, picks at the label of his beer, and shakes his head. “Carter, if there’s something _you_ want to share with me, I want you to. We’re drift compatible, we’re co-pilots, and we’re going to be heading into battle together. I think we can safely assume we’re going to learn plenty about each other moving forward. Let’s not…dwell.”

“Okay,” she agrees before hesitating. “There is just one more thing that I want to clear up. That memory of our first meeting? The, um, emotions we felt when we relived it.”

Jack thought about the hot flash of attraction, the racing sensation of his heart, the way he had felt her own insides clench at the sight of him. He swallowed and met her eyes steadily. 

“It doesn’t matter what we felt, Sam. It’s against policy for co-pilots to be anything more than that.”

The light in her eyes dims a bit and she reaches out to brush a finger along the outside seam of his pants along his thigh. It makes him suck in a breath in surprise, but before he can say or do anything, she withdraws and retreats, curling into herself further and taking her heat with her. 

“Exactly what I was going to say, sir.”

It’s the first lie they tell each other. 

________________

The Stargate—and by extension, Sam and Jack—become legendary within a matter of a few missions. Their link is strong, one of the strongest the program has seen in years. Their movements are in-sync and perfect. Jack takes the lead tactically but Sam is right behind him, reading the situation and thinking ahead to the strategy Jack envisions and works on pressing buttons and setting controls to finish the job. 

Jack is the first punch but Sam is the knockout blow. 

Together, they put away four Kaijus and run alongside a half dozen bomber runs that secure Earth safety for a few months. 

It should frighten both of them at how easily they slip into each other’s lives, neural link or no. They spend hours together in simulation fights and training. Jack likes the way Sam racks her own weights and volunteers to spot for him. They’re joined by Teal’c occasionally in the gym and he listens in as Sam and Teal’c talk about old Godzilla movies and the parallels to their current predicament. 

He learns that she can’t live without blue Jell-o at least three times a week and she gets cranky without her morning coffee (which, to his disgust, she takes black). He learns that she reads Jaeger schematics and mission reports for _fun_ and he has to drag her to the community entertainment room a few times a week to drop in on a poker game (which she is hilariously bad at, to his delight and her frustration) or to watch the movie of the week. 

The other Jaeger teams give them a wide berth, discomfited by their closeness. Pilots are close by nature, their neural links and compatibility demand it. But the moment most pilots are off-mission, they retreat to their separate corners, as if they need a reminder they are their own person.

Jack and Sam don’t seem to crave the separation the way other pilots do, though. It starts rumors on base about inappropriate behavior, about what _really_ goes on behind their closed doors. 

________________

The fragile, thin balance they’ve been walking comes to a crashing, breaking halt when the first mission in almost a year goes south. It’s a standard recon mission, meant to scout out a portion of the Pacific ocean that had been rumbling with activity on the sensors. Kaijus had been popping up along these borders and drift lines, but the readings of this particular area were off-the-charts violent and aggressive, shaking with energy.

It should have been easy. 

They hadn’t expected to actually find a Kaiju waiting for them, though. And before Jack had time to think and tell Sam to punch the boosters and get them hell out of dodge, a giant, monstrous claw was swiping at the Stargate and punching them both loose, shaking them out of their neural link and leaving them disoriented and lost. Around them, alarms were going off indicating system failure and limited oxygen and a fire in the control panel. 

Through the dizzy, confusing haze of trauma, Jack could just make out Sam popping open the panels of the Stargate and trying to work on rewiring the systems, trying to stabilize their faithful Jaeger. 

Another knock to the Stargate rattled him and he smacked his head against the metal frame of the control room. He groaned and put his hand to his head, coming away with bloody fingers as his vision blurred. 

“Carter!” he yelled, stumbling over to her and grabbing her by the arm, pulling her from her work roughly. “We gotta get outta here! Escape pods, _now.”_

“I can save it, sir! I can get us linked back up and—“

“Goddammit, Carter, do what I say. Pods, now.”

“No! I can’t leave the Stargate. I can’t—“

“Carter!”

“Jack!”

Around them, alarms blared and wires sparked and flashing red signs on every screen indicated they were entering complete and total system failure. Another roar from the Kaiju outside rattled the metal Jaeger and Jack braced himself and Sam against the metal grating for another blow. The entire machine rattled and shook with the force of an earthquake. 

Sam tried to stand, tried to make her way back to the power source she was working on. 

“Sir, just let me—“

But it was too much. All he could think about was losing Charlie just like this, going down in a metal tin robot with his son’s screams in his ears, in his brain. He wouldn’t risk this with her, wouldn’t risk losing her when he could save her.

He grabbed her by the arm and spun her around in the tight, contained space of the Jaeger control room. Her lips parted in surprise and she braced herself against him with her palms flat on his chest. 

“Don’t make me lose you, too,” he shouted, shaking her slightly in anger and fear. “Don’t.”

The moment seemed to hang between them as Carter read in between each of his words, hearing what he didn’t say. She curled her fingertips against the fabric of his battle shirt and took one last, long look at the panel behind her that was sparking and flaming before nodding. 

“Let’s go,” she said, turning her attention to the escape pods and dragging Jack behind her, her hand falling into his as they had done all those months ago when they had first linked up. It had been a source of anchorage, a way to root herself to a moment. 

The escape pod worked beautifully and they crammed into the smaller ship, shaking and terrified and waited for the automated systems to kick in and take them back to command’s home base. 

Together, hands still locked together in a vice grip, they watched through the shield of the escape pod, as their beloved Stargate—and the thin facade protecting their relationship and all the things left unsaid—disintegrated and fell into the bottom of the Pacific ocean.

________________

He’s working on his third bootleg beer since Fraiser cleared him and Carter from medical with little more than a shine of a penlight in his eyes and a clear blood pressure reading. Hammond had demanded a mission report as soon as their pod had returned them back to base, but after taking in the shaken look in each of his pilots’ eyes, he had agreed to wait until next day. 

It’s the first time in almost a year that he’s spent post-mission alone and away from Carter. It feels wrong, somehow. But not as wrong as leaving his heart exposed out there in that Jaeger, not as wrong as letting his fear of losing Carter override his tactical sense. He should have done what Carter asked: tried to do everything in their power to salvage the Stargate and take down the Kaiju attacking them.

Jaegers weren’t cheap to build and losing one was grounds for dismissal. He’d almost welcome the dismissal, if that was the case. He didn’t much feel up to being in command, of being put in the position to choose between Carter and the world. Jack’s not sure he would make the right call, not sure he knows what the right call is. 

So when the knock at his door comes, he should be more surprised than he is. Carter hadn’t met his eye in medical, had drawn her knees to her chest in a gesture he recognized as one of self-preservation. He figured she needed space, too. 

As usual, he was wrong when it came to Samantha Carter. 

He barely has the door open before she pushes her way inside, plucking the beer from his hand for her own, and draining the last of it in one go. It’s hot, is what it is: Carter making herself at home in his quarters, Carter unafraid of him, Carter taking what’s his and making it hers. 

“Can I get you a beer?” he asks sarcastically, already digging into the box tucked behind his desk and pulling the dark bottle out for her. 

She takes it but doesn’t open it, just places it on the table and stares at him. He pops the cap off of his drink and maintains eye contact as he takes a healthy gulp. 

“What are you doing here, Carter?”

She gives him an incredulous look and he sags, energy draining from his body. “Fair enough,” he mutters, taking a seat on the edge of his bunk opposite of her on the couch. He rolls the bottle between his hands, thinking. 

“Listen, we can leave what happened up in the Stargate at the bottom of the ocean. No one has to know that I—that I—“ 

_That I love you._

She flinches and he doesn’t know if the reaction stems from reference to the loss of their— _her—_ beloved Stargate or the reference to the exposure of his feelings for her. 

He’s too much of a coward to ask. 

“And if I don’t want to leave it there?” she asks, boldly meeting his gaze. She was always the braver one of them. He loves her more for it. 

“Sam,” he says haltingly, unsure how to proceed. In the field, he can make a decision under pressure, can make a choice between left or right, life or death. But here, with the woman who holds his heart and soul in her hands, he isn’t sure what the right move is. 

“Hammond came to see me in medical after you left. He’s, uh, moving me off the front lines and back to Jaeger research and development.”

“What!”

Anger surges through him. Carter shouldn’t be punished for _his_ mistake. She’s a damn good pilot, has instincts that compliment his own, and she deserves to be out there fighting alongside him. 

Carter traces the label of her beer bottle and continues. “It took a damn near miracle for me to fight with you as long as we did in the first place. And with the Stargate gone and the Thor out of commission, Earth is down a couple of Jaegers and apparently up a few new drift lines.” She finally pops the cap off her own bottle and drinks until bottle is half-empty. 

He raises an eyebrow at her. “Carter?”

“We’re losing out there, Jack,” she says quietly. “ _We_ almost lost out there.”

“But we didn’t,” he reminds her gently, standing and crossing the distance between them to sit beside her on the couch. His hand twitches to touch her—like it always does. But he clenches his fingers into a fist and doesn’t reach for her—like he always does. 

“It just has me thinking,” Sam mused, voice soft and pondering, tentative. “The first time we sat like this, we told ourselves we couldn’t do anything about _this.”_ She waved her hand in the space between them, indicating with a gesture their entire relationship. 

“It’s just that, I’m not sure it makes any sense for us to _not_ do something about this any more.”

Her hand snuck out and settled on his upper thigh, her thumb stroking the inside seam of his pants. Jack sucked in a breath and shuddered at her touch, giving into the urge to touch her. He covered her hand with his own. 

“Sam….”

“Don’t make me lose you, either,” she whispered, leaning forward and cupping his face to turn it towards her own with her now-free hand, her beer bottle long forgotten on the table. “Jack, _please.”_

Jack turned his cheek into the palm of her hand, nuzzled his nose softly at the thin skin of her wrist. He tried to think of all the reasons they shouldn’t do this, the reasons he shouldn’t lean in and take what he’d wanted desperately since the day he laid eyes on her. 

He thought about the world burning outside, the sense of duty and the call to arms asked of him by Hammond. He thought about a never-ending war and regulations and rules. 

And then he thought about her—Sam.

Her smile and the way making her smile had become his new purpose and reason for living. He thought about the way he knew why she no longer baked cookies and the way she watched science fiction movies just to tear the science in them apart. He thought about the way this woman knew him—his memories, his thoughts, his soul—better than any living person and how he _wanted_ to her to know him in every way. 

The decision to throw the world away and let it burn for this woman was easier than breathing. 

He dropped his beer onto the table beside her own and turned his attention back to her: all flushed cheeks and a hopeful spark in her eyes. With trembling fingers, he reached out and traced the line of her jaw and hooked his finger under her chin, lifting her face to his own. 

When his lips finally— _finally—_ pressed against hers, it was better than any neural link. She was hot and ready beneath his touch, arching her entire body against him as she opened her mouth to him, allowing his tongue to dip into the wet cavern of her mouth to explore every sensitive place there. 

His tongue flicked against hers, tangling softly before flicking upwards and stroking the roof of her mouth. She groaned at the sensation, hips rocking up against his, and she threaded her fingers into his hair, tugging at the short strands to draw him closer. 

His body covered hers, pinning her beneath him against the couch and laying her out. Her legs fell on either side of his hips so he could cradle himself between her thighs, seeking out the heat seeping through the fabric of her pants. 

Unwittingly, he rocked desperately against her, the tightening of her legs around his waist encouraging him to keep pressing, keeping thrusting lightly. 

Her teeth nipped at his lower lip before breaking the kiss and latching her mouth to the cords of his neck, gasping and nuzzling against the skin, groaning his name. 

Her fingertips slipped beneath his shirt and traced over the scars of his back and then into the dip of the small of his back and then further beneath the waistband of his pants, fingertip pressing into the flesh of his backside and pulling him closer against her.

It was everything, absolutely everything, he had wanted since their first linking. He _knew_ this woman and from the way she clutched at him, the way she just as easily threw the world out the window for this moment—for them—he knew that she felt the same.

Still, they were hurtling towards the point of no return and he had to be _sure_ she was in this with him. 

With a groan and a soft _pop_ of their lips as they separated, Jack held himself up above her on one strong arm, looking down at her. Her lips were swollen where he’d kissed and nipped at her mouth, her cheeks were flushed pink with desire, and her hair was disheveled from his hands and her writhing against the back of the couch. 

“Sam,” he panted, pressing his hips against hers. “We can stop right now. You can still have the Jaegers, you can still fight, you—“

She wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him down so he was resting all of his weight against her. She kissed him soundly, stopping his next words. 

“You,” she whispered against his mouth, kissing him again. “I just want you.”

He stroked her cheek with the back of his fingers and kissed her in relief, running his fingers down her side and slipping under her shirt to stroke the soft skin of her waist and the underside of her breast. 

In his bunk a few miles beneath the surface of a broken Earth, Jack O’Neill found himself in the arms of the woman he loved, his soulmate. Together, they let the world burn for a moment together. 

The war would wait for them in the morning.

For now, they had each other. 

Finally.

**Author's Note:**

> oh my god how many times did the verb tense change hahahahahaha


End file.
